The Central City is now open for business! You will be dodging turrets, picniccing at Pioneer's Park, visiting the Town Hall, and figuring out how to power up a train. And ultimately acquiring a Sledgehammer. Goodbye walls! The city is located to the west of Crown Station, and there are three ways of entry to the new area: two from the north, and one from the south. If one of them proves more difficult than the rest, try another way in!

Update Highlights

New Early Access Roadmap

We've revised our Early Access Roadmap to reflect the updates we've done so far, and the updates that are planned before the full launch. Minor changes may happen, but that's the big picture. You'll find a nicer scrollable version of the chart inside the game in the Change Log screen. You may also notice that the Summer 2021 full launch has turned into ominous 2021/H2, but we're still hoping to launch closer to July than to December. We've also got some Post-Launch stuff planned, but waay too early to talk about that yet.

Welcome to the Mighty Mall!

I'm not sure if it's mandatory to have a mall in a post-apocalyptic ex-human piece of fiction, but we didn't want to take any chances and get the z-police after us. So here you go.
It's not the biggest of the malls, but the customers love it.
Deeper in the city there's also a pub where you can spend some quality time with the fellow patrons. (This is a mockup screenshot though. You are not allowed to stand on tables like that. They'd throw you out if you did.)

XP Level Cap Hike

You can now level up to level 34. That's three levels more than in the previous build. We realised we need to be a bit less prudent with the levels in order to reach the level cap targets we've got planned for the launch version. Instead of our previous plans, we'll probably make it so that you can eventually get all the skills in the skill pool if you level up enough. So the final cap will be the total amount of skills we'll have. If you want to start a new game and try pick things in a different order, that's fine, but you can also play a looong game where you try and get all the skills at once. This will mean that those XP bonus skills are now worth picking as they don't end up taking one of the finite skill slots.

New Icon

There's a new icon to replace that old red crowbar on a white background which was always meant to be merely a placeholder. You'll be seeing the larger version of that whole box shot in the next update perhaps!

Total Progress

The Collection Total Progress tab now shows your progress towards full completion of the game. Note that the numbers only reflect the current build, so the percentages may change as we add new content. But you can get a feel how much of the Early Access content you've completed at the moment. You can't 100% everything yet.

[strike]New Audio System[/strike]

As those of you playing the beta versions have noticed, we're working on new audio system to replace the old DirectSound based implementation. We're using our XAudio2 sound system that we developed for Xbox One as a base, and adding some new features. We were meaning to include it in this patch, but we not able to fix all the glitches we encountered yet, so we reverted back to the old sound system for now. Hopefully you'll meet the new system in the next update!

CHANGE LOG

ADDED

- Access to 'Central'. - Level Cap is now 34. Up by THREE levels! - Sledgehammer! (Unlockable through area progression.) - Fancier Early Access Roadmap. - Showing menu text when you can't save game. - Some Quests have More Info button in Quest menu. - Autosaving game when storing materials, accessing Myth Tablets, wells, etc if no enemies are near. - Collection total progress bars. - New Builder's Kit Quest for the sawmill (located near the original Sawmill).

CHANGED

- You can't save when notifications that would result in save state changes are showing. - Lighting performance optimizations. - Rebalanced all wall tile HP and DMG thresholds. - Changes to multiple other HP and DMG thresholds of objects. - Chaser spotting animation is now roughly 20% faster. - Optimized more compact stage format saves almost 0.5GB of space! - Performance optimizations. - Vultures drop eggs if somehow killed. - Raised Proximity Mine Damage by roughly 20%. - New UI interaction sounds. - Increased the amount of material actor stacks that can reside in 10 meter radius from 30 to 150.

FIXED

- Fixed world map point of interest clicking outside map borders. - Fixed world map are information not showing before going to Collection screen. - Showing Quest reward recipes properly. - Serpent's Crossing doesn't show 1 extra monster in link tower radar. - Added additional checks to older quests requiring opening of certain doors for the possibility of the doorway being destroyed. - Object shadow fixes. - Island map rendering fixes (showing decals). - Not stealing mouse cursor multitasking out of the game window with camera rotate button held down. - Sound panning for sounds playing behind the camera. - Usual open world fixes regarding floating objects, weird decals, etc.

Up Next

If everything goes according to the master plan, the Polaris Express will leave from Platform B in three weeks. You know I'm talking about the next update, right? The level design is progressing nicely, and as you can see in the Roadmap (above), we're planning on launching TWO new areas in the next update. So it will be a big one. Full steam ahead! Choo choo!

[ 2021-05-12 15:07:54 CET ] [ Original post ]